Workers' Liberty

Bonjour, la classe!
A reply to Koos Couvée
In his article, "ENS: Why have we lost?", Koos Couvée raises vital questions relating to the strategy of the student movement.

Koos, is a sabbatical officer at the highly militant, well-organised Sussex University, which is at the leading edge of the UK student movement, marching out in front of the great mass of students. It is natural, then, that he and his fellow students at Sussex should encounter all the serious obstacles in our path before the rest of us do. The apparently impenetrable brick wall into which Sussex students have charged, is the problem of the student strike.

Koos lays out the problem. The ENS campaign at Sussex was not meant as a plea for more dialogue with management; it was not ENS's intention to politely ask management to behave better, but to force them to carry out ENS's demands: "listening; or the desire for more meetings with managers had nothing to do with the birth of ENS".

But the tools that the activists had to hand weren't suited to the task: "Leaflets were produced, articles were written, rallies were organised and attended by masses of students" and teaching staff largely supported the campaign. But... then what? Leaflets, speeches and articles only register dissent, communicate ideas, and rally support for a platform or demand. But ENS needed to do more than 'make a noise': to force management's hand, it had to organise a show of strength, a concrete action that would hurt management economically. But how?

Koos raises another problem – one of participation and democracy. Koos writes of how many students agreed with the campaign without it becoming "their struggle". He considers that they were alienated, as participants in someone else's campaign: an activist core would decide on actions and the 'mass' of students would be trotted on stage to participate in or consume what was placed before them.

These problems are common to the whole contemporary UK student movement. Because of their superior organisation and militancy, the Sussex comrades are among the best placed in Britain to apprehend these problems – but also the best-placed to solve them. If, standing on one another's shoulders, they were to haul themselves to the top of this brick wall and peek over at the path ahead on the other side... They would see a crowd of French students, busily conducting a General Assembly!

The General Assembly as a tool of struggle (as opposed to the rather sad, shrivelled peace-time equivalent that exists in many UK student unions) is part of the militant heritage of the French students, and has been the backbone of every major student battle since 1968. Again and again it has been proven that the success of a student movement hangs in large part on the students' ability to build and maintain General Assemblies. The absence of similar organs in the UK is not evidence of two different, though equally advanced, parallel activist cultures. It merely shows that we in the UK are far behind French students.

During a student movement the aim of the students must be to constitute the General Assembly (at which all students are welcome and have a vote) as the sovereign body of the university, replacing the University Council as the decision-making body. Major battles always tend to start the same way: the student unions, activist groups and revolutionary parties work together to inform students of the content of the coming fight: be it an attack to fend off, or a concession to be won. At this first stage, their methods remain similar to ours – stunts, stalls, meetings, leafleting, articles, posters, demonstrations and the internet. Then they take a step further, and call a general assembly. These almost always start small, with maybe a hundred or so at the first one in a large institution, but can grow rapidly, often reaching many hundreds or a thousand within weeks. Each successive GA votes resolutions, elects a strike committee (or opens an open-to-all voluntary strike committee), and builds for the next GA – until a sufficient number of students are present that a strike becomes a realistic possibility; that a strike voted through and enforced by a GA of that size would likely draw the majority of students in its wake. As the GAs grow and approach the critical size, management grows jittery, has security start checking student cards at entrances to university buildings, locks lecture theatres – like a well-bred public schoolboy, it starts what will be a bitter fight with polite little shoves and mannered understatement. Locks have to be forced, security guards bamboozled or sprinted past, the Strike Committee has to employ a little ingenuity, and a certain amount of courage and daring, to carry off the big GA, and win the strike vote.

Traditional wisdom says that because students do not create value, it makes no difference if they strike. Students do not create value, but this does not render the strike a worthless tactic! The strike is not made worthless – but it means that merely passively withholding labour (not turning up to lectures) is a useless gesture, and unlikely to be taken up by very many students. A strike has to be active – it has to stop the university dead, and begin to rule it itself.

The point of the student strike is not to cause economic damage to the university (although this is an inevitable consequence given the penetration of business into universities and research departments – and it need not be a minor consideration). Students do not create value like workers – the interruption of teaching and research will hit their own educations first, for which they are paying. The point of the student strike is to act as a show of strength on the part of the students: to demonstrate their ability to carry off a "journée école morte" – a "dead school day" – a total shut-down of the whole university. Having voted for a strike at a suitably massive GA, the strikers use two methods – telling students about the strike and encouraging participation in occupations, in the strike committee's commissions (specialised voluntary task forces, e.g. the propaganda commission, the occupation commission, the anti-repression commission, etc.) and in the next GA; and in physical blockades – picketing university sites, bike-locking doors and building barricades. Of this latter list, mass pickets are the most important and efficient.

Apart from demonstrating the strength of the GA and its strike committee, the student strike makes a clean slate of the university, transforms it into a new space, over which the GA and its strike committee is king. Meetings, teach-ins, propaganda production and other events are organised; if the strike is sufficiently strong, overnight occupations can protect the strike. These were rare in the 2007 LRU battle, but in the 2006 CPE movement, permanent occupations lasting weeks and months were not uncommon. Through such measures, the strike can sustain and strengthen itself, maintain regular mass Gas, and provide a militant education to students and change the political culture of a university overnight.

This infuriates and terrifies management. They will start email-based propaganda campaigns, hire private security, shut down whole sites to prevent Gas from taking place. In certain cases, they have invited fascist youth organisations onto campus to break the strike.

Especially in cases of long overnight occupations, the most-militant "core" runs the risk of isolation from the rest of the student body, and from society in general. Exciting days and nights spent running the (vegan) strike canteen, making banners and discussing the bright Jerusalem that they want to build starting with their university library, often leads some activists into a kind of ultra-left delirium, in which they forget basic real-world political necessities, like relating to students and workers outside the occupied campus. To avoid this slow death, regular demonstrations in town and in the capital, deputations to Trades Councils and striking workplaces, and leafleting expeditions into student housing and into town are crucial, especially given that student struggles are fought against the government as much as they are fought against a given university management, and that all-sided political agitation, links with the unions movement, and press visibility are therefore vital. The LRU movement, in its later months, was only kept alive by the impetus provided by the parallel railway strike, and soon slackened and declined as a national movement once that strike ended.

The strike needs national support from the student movement; it needs a voice on a national level. Preferably, as soon as more than one university goes on strike, they will constitute a National Co-ordination made up of deputations elected from GAs in each striking campus, which will aim to replace the leadership of the national unions as the voice of the student movement. In 2006, the CPE movement failed to organise a sufficiently strong such Co-ordination, and the left-Blairite head of the majority national student union UNEF, Bruno Juillard, was able to position himself as a self-appointed political tribune of the movement. When we reach such a situation in Britain, we will naturally have to strain every muscle to prevent the likes of Wes Streeting from pulling off the same trick!

So far, so faraway. It looks at the movement like we in the UK are a frighteningly long way from all this. But are we? And if we are a long way yet from massive GAs and student strikes, what use is such a perspective to us?

Firstly, several universites have proven that mass action in the UK is not impossible. We have recently seen large actions at Manchester, Sussex and Southampton, a 200-strong anti-arms trade demo at Cambridge, and a mass picket of a fascist speech in Oxford, to name but a few examples. Maybe these actions didn't draw in the huge numbers that a mass strike requires, but they show that we are a long way from square one now.

But future glimmerings of radical mass action aren't only seen in the mass actions of today. The crucial ingredient of the French-style student strike is the disciplined, sovereign mass meeting: the General Assembly. General Assemblies already exist in embryo in British universities, in the form of General Meetings. In many universities, even in a climate of defeat and stagnation, quorate Open Meetings are regularly seen, with relatively little preparation (when compared to the massive campaigns preceding GAs in France). The experience of comrades at UCL, following their fight against military recruiters and the right wing, which hinged on a General Meeting, would be a useful point of reference here.

Secondly, having a plan, a model for the kind of thing we want to do, a draft for a strategy that we think can win, which looks realistic, will itself qualitatively improve our ability to win people to our campaign, and carry out our plan. We will find it hard to win people to our side, or change students' political horizons, until we can answer the question, "OK, so you have a big march, and you get a lot of students in a room... then what?"

Koos bemoans a "liberal political culture" which never envisages "escaping the subordinate position of demanding" – in which political action is conceived of as a discussion between parties whose interests can be neatly reconciled, rather than as a struggle between two bitterly opposed camps.

Our weakness, the weakness of the left, feeds this culture. If we cannot put forward a coherent, convincing strategy for "forcing" management and the government, and instead limit ourselves to the tools of "making noise" and "asking", then it is quite natural and legitimate that many students will say, "oh well, if we can't do more than ask management for favours anyway, surely we would be better off asking nicely?", and thereby fall into Labour Students' trap of chasing "respectability" and "credibility". If we can't elaborate a plan, a set of tactics for a successful strike campaign, we will already have made a great step towards defeating this liberal culture. By opening up a credible perspective for "forcing", we will there and then be able to start leading many students away from the path of "asking".

This is not a perspective for erecting a permanent system of GAs as a "more radical" alternative to student unions, although that will be our aim one day. This is about advocating the use of the GA as a tool for struggle, the thing which will allow you to organise a successful student strike, which is put into use at a specific stage of a given mobilisation. Of course, during a strike, the GA becomes sovereign, in that all student organisations are obliged to follow its decisions, including student union leaders, be they friend or foe. But the major tool that allows you to construct a General Assembly in the first place is the SU itself. Its size, activist and material resources, and its visibility and legitimacy amongst the students, which we as an activist network generally cannot match at any campus, and certainly not at the national level. In the construction of the GA that will temporarily (and one day permanently) supersede it, the machinery of the SU must be utilised. And, to quote a poster from after the CPE movement, "The union is where the movement goes after the movement!": once the movement is over and attendance at GAs dies down, the SU is the organ which must maintain the improved organisation, consciousness and memory which the students have built up during the battle.

To comrades at the advanced universities who have hit this wall: Haul yourselves over! Construct General Assemblies! So that when the rest of us catch up with you, you will already have opened the way for us.